Scientists move closer to a long-lasting flu vaccine

NEW YORK TIMES

October 29, 2012Updated: October 29, 2012 8:41pm

Photo: Michael Patrick, MBI

Linda Howard is vaccinated at the annual Free Flu Shot Saturday in Knoxville, Tenn., last week. Howard, 66, said, "I come here every year for my shot." Annual vaccinations may soon be a thing of the past, replaced by a long-lasting shot.

Linda Howard is vaccinated at the annual Free Flu Shot Saturday in...

As this year's flu season gathers steam, doctors and pharmacists have a fresh stock of vaccines to offer their patients.

The vaccines usually provide strong protection against the virus, but only for a while. Vaccines for other diseases typically work for years or decades. With the flu, though, next fall it will be time to get another dose.

"That's the goal: two shots when you're young, and then boosters later in life. That's where we'd like to go," Nabel said. He predicted that scientists would reach that goal before long - "in our lifetime, for sure, unless you're 90 years old," he said.

End to pandemic threat

Such a vaccine would be a great help in the fight against seasonal flu outbreaks, which kill an estimated 500,000 people a year.

But in a review to be published in the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, Sarah Gilbert of Oxford University argues that they could potentially have an even greater benefit.

Periodically, a radically new type of flu has evolved and rapidly spread around the world. A pandemic in 1918 is estimated to have killed 50 million people.

With current technology, scientists would not have a vaccine for a new pandemic strain until the outbreak was well under way.

An effective universal flu vaccine would already be able to fight it.

"Universal vaccination with universal vaccines would put an end to the threat of global disaster that pandemic influenza can cause," Gilbert wrote in her review.